Fortune Article: Amazon Retains Public Cloud Crown

According to this article on Fortune.com, although Amazon Web Services still dominates the public cloud market, Microsoft is making ground and closing the gap.

They cite a survey featuring input from 1060 cloud customers:

Overall, AWS is used by 57 percent of respondents, flat from last year. Enterprise adoption of AWS grew from 50 percent to 56 percent while adoption by smaller businesses fell slightly from 61 percent to 58 percent. Azure IaaS grows strongly from 12 percent to 17 percent adoption, while Azure PaaS grows from 9 percent to 13 percent.

CRN Article: Oracle claims it is quicker than rivals in the cloud

According to this article in CRN, Oracle spends $5.4 billion on R&D every year and that is double our nearest competitor," Senior vice president for cloud Shawn Price said. "So not only are they not spending the requisite R&D as a percentage of total revenue, they don't have the base from which to actually evolve." 

Price labelled any comments that Oracle is itself late to the cloud party as "naïve" and said it couldn't have made this shift any faster. "If you look at our competitors, they don't have a cloud ERP offering," he said. "If you think about SAP, it has no [ERP] offering in the cloud. We are often tagged as being late to the cloud, but if you look at the performance, the scale, that's very naïve. We have 19 data centers, 70 million subscriptions, 600 million SaaS applications and we have taken all the infrastructure that our customers have bought from us and imported that to the cloud.

CIO.com Article: Microsoft, Google earnings shed light on cloud war

According to this article on CIO.com, while Microsoft currently has a significant lead over Google in the workplace productivity market, the companies' cloud-based offerings are just a small fraction of their businesses. However, both plan to invest heavily in Office 365 and Google for Work in 2016.

The article explains that only 13 percent of businesses currently use either Office 365 or Google for Work, according to new research from Gartner, which means massive opportunities for growth exist for both Microsoft and Google as more businesses switch to cloud services. 

"Among public companies using cloud-based email, Microsoft is more popular with larger organizations and has more than an 80 percent share of companies using cloud email with revenue above $10 billion," says Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner. "Google's popularity is better among smaller companies, approaching a 50 percent share of companies with revenue less than $50 million."

Washington Post Article: The cloud wars are seriously heating up

According to this article in the Washington Post, Cloud Computing "means a huge business opportunity — and that has sparked heavy competition among companies looking to manage the tech needs of the next decade's enterprise market."

It points out that cloud revenues were a very large focus for analyst attention on recent earnings calls with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Oracle.

The article highlighted the fact that Amazon reported $687 million in operating income on $2.4 billion in revenue for Amazon Web Services (AWS).  It also predicted that AWS revenue for the year was on track to be "just short" of $10 billion by the end of its fourth quarter.  It also explained that Microsoft does not break out specifically how much money it's cloud infrastructure service,  Azure, makes, but it did report that Azure had grown 140 percent in the past year. Its cloud services overall, which include traditional server businesses such as Exchange, brought in $6.3 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, a 5 percent improvement over the same period last year.